Recent protests against police brutality in Nigeria and the Arab Spring, which was sparked by an incident of police brutality in Tunisia, led to public demands that brought political reforms. This paper explores the question, how do citizens evaluate their government in regards to corruption? Using the Afrobarometer Wave 6 dataset, I investigate the relationship between the public's perception of police and upper-level government officials’ corruption in African countries. Due to lack of transparency, the public has no direct information from upper-level bureaucracy but can evaluate corruption of upper-level government officials through direct experience with police. My finding demonstrates that regardless of regime type, the corruption perception of police influences the corruption perception of upper-level government officials. The public cues to evaluate their government quality are likely derived from interactions with police. Therefore corruption perception of police can affect government legitimacy.

This paper develops a model for a particular type of grand corruption often encountered in developing countries, namely, the sale of government positions by autocratic rulers. A two-stage game is considered, where the autocrat moves first to maximize his revenue from the sale of positions in the cabinet by choosing a price that must be paid by interested politicians. The latter become bureaucrats who maximize their utility from bribe revenues for the given price set by the president. Backward induction yields subgame-perfect equilibrium levels of corruption of the president and bureaucrats. A key insight from this analysis is that conventional tools of fighting corruption become ineffective when corruption at the very top is ignored. The model is distinctive in its treatment of individual moral costs of being corrupt and in its consideration of a revolutionary constraint on the autocrat's choices.